AoIR 2024

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Simran Agarwal, whose interest is in platformisation intermediaries in the Indian news industry. Her interest here is especially in the meso-layer of intermediaries, where AI-driven machine learning tools provide strategic counsel to newsrooms, broker interactions between platforms and publishers with the aim to ‘help’, ‘assist’, or ‘free’ journalists, and appear as certified partners.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, who begins by noting the critical role of data annotation practices in shaping the machine learning process underlying generative AI; such annotation is a world-making practice, must align with editorial values and the journalistic ethos of objectivity, and can of course also reproduce pre-existing societal biases.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Nadja Schaetz, whose interest is in AI hype in news coverage. Journalism has often uncritically covered the rise of generative AI, and swallowed the claims of AI companies about the capacities of their tools; this project collaborated with the Associated Press Local AI Initiative and conducted participant observation in local newsrooms to understand journalistic reactions to this initiative. Through the project AP worked with five newsrooms to provide AI-supported technologies.

I’m chairing the next session at this AoIR 2024 conference, which is on the intersections (or collision) between journalism and AI. We start with Sangeet Kumar, who notes the long history of complex interactions between digital media platforms and news publishers; news is just a type of content for platforms, while for news producers it is a mission and vocation. There is a substantial amount of traffic coming from digital search and social media platforms to journalistic sites, and therefore a substantial level of dependency.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Keara Caitlyn Martina Quadros, whose interest is youth activism for climate action online. Her focus is especially on TikTok, where many pro- and anti-climate action activists and influencers are posting to hashtags like #climatechange. Such content also overlaps with what is posted on other platforms, of course.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Luigi Arminio, whose interest is in the sociolinguistic patterns of polarisation on climate change on Facebook (this approach carries on from the previous presentation). Such patterns may also represent socioeconomic differences: people with lower socioeconomic status tend to be more open to climate change-denialist rhetoric, and such groups also differ from others in their overall communication styles.

Up next in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the great Luca Rossi, whose interest is in visual communication strategies in climate change debates. Online debate on these topics tends to be highly polarised between those who do and do not accept the scientific consensus on climate change; it is also difficult to discuss in the abstract, so that visual representations become especially important in these debates.

The first full day at the AoIR 2024 conference starts with a panel on climate change, and the first speaker is Emily West, whose interest is in the climate policies of the large digital platform companies – such as Amazon’s ‘Climate Pledge’ initiative. This is supposed to provide an opportunity for involvement by other stakeholders, and some energy transparency measures.

It’s an unseasonably rain-free evening in Sheffield, England, which means that I must be at the opening of the 25th Association of Internet Researchers conference. After warm welcomes from the President of AoIR and the Lord Mayor of Sheffield, we begin the conference with a keynote by Seeta Peña Gangadharan, whose focus is on technological refusal. What have we learnt from past pushbacks against socio-technical developments? How have such refusals evolved over time? Where might we be going, for instance with the coming rise of the quantum Internet?

What comes together here are strands of informed consent and refusal; of counter-publics; of other objections against technological and social developments. There is often also a sense of helplessness and coercion, especially for underprivileged groups and communities – yet also a strong sense of defiance and disobedience against top-down pressures. This can be seen as a new form of civil disobedience, directed no longer simply at the state but – since code is law – at the now power-holders in technology and other institutions and companies.

But in supporting such refusal, are we also aligning with populists and angry mobs – e.g. anti-vaxxer communities, and their disobedient and violent attacks against telecommunications technologies and installations? The key difference here is that populism seeks to create division and assert supremacy; this is not necessarily the case in other forms of technological disobedience. We might therefore consider technological refusal as a normative as well as an empirical concept: it can address individual and collective actions, but need not overfit and include problematic and violent groups that seek to resist the status quo.